Visual Art, Automation, and Artificial Intelligence

Catalog description

The advent of text-to-image generative AI models has upended longstanding assumptions about the human labor and social impact of visual art. Questions about veracity, originality, and intellectual property, however, are not new to visual culture. This course will connect visual practices rooted in ideas of automation and computation to current debates about artificial intelligence and its practical/ethical implications for human creativity. We will focus on contemporary art and design practices from the 1950s to the present, such as conceptual art, new media art (e.g., video, digital, and computer art), generative art, and algorithmic art, as well as the emergence of computer-aided software, rapid prototyping, and other automated approaches to design. Studying how artists and designers have tackled such issues as authorship, collaboration, open sourcing, and appropriation will underpin our efforts to envision informed, ethically sound approaches to AI-generated image making. In addition to class discussions and debates, experimental activities employing text-to-image models will be a central component of the course.